Overview + User Guide
Welcome to my essay, in multimodal format. Multimodality operates under the assumption that language is not the sole means of conveying information, and so takes a turn towards incorporating media beyond the written word. Multimodality has become incredibly prevalent due to the internet—news articles hosted online, for example, often include an accompanying video alongside the report, and social media sites are a mixture of text posts, photos, livestreams, and various other elements.
Multimodality is useful in the respect that different “modes” of presenting information are better able to convey different things. In the context of this essay, I will be presenting text, audio, and video. The text, for example, will be used for analysis or theoretical discussion that might rely on complex information or require a couple re-reads, which can be difficult to grapple with in audio or video format. I’ll also be analyzing musical performances, and providing a clip of the piece that I’m discussing will allow you to hear and/or see it for yourself. Finally, quotes will be taken from videos and podcasts, and much like one should adhere to the original context when quoting from something like an academic journal, I’d like to present these quotes from audio sources in as close to their original context as possible—which is a luxury uniquely afforded here by multimodality.
In encountering (I use this word rather than “reading” because of its multimodal nature) this essay, then, you will find audio and video clips embedded within the text. Examples of each of these are provided below:
(From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPITcE5P8w)
The example above shows how audio clips will appear. Simply click the arrow to begin playback, and drag along the timeline if you’d like to replay any specific section.
The example above shows how video clips will appear. You’ll have to click on the play button twice for it to begin—this helps reduce loading times for this page. The video should automatically start and end at the specific points under discussion in the essay (notice how in this example it started 6 seconds in and ended at 12), but the citation information provided in-text will include timestamps that you can use in a pinch.
Parenthetical citations are given for all works referenced, and a link to a Works Cited page can be found at the bottom of this page, or on the homepage of this site.
Introduction: Signal and Noise
In the excellent Ways of Hearing podcast from Radiotopia’s Showcase, host Damon Krukowski articulates a radical change in the ways in which we listen. He notes in the introduction of the podcast that it is devoted to
(Ways of Hearing, ep. 6, 3:39-4:21)
Indeed, this shift in hearing that Krukowski describes is incredibly pervasive, affecting every aspect of our lives. Some of these effects are generative—digital music platforms, for example, have radically increased the availability of music. In particular, bandcamp.com, which provides 85% of album sales revenue directly to artists—versus the fractions of pennies per song that streaming services like Spotify offer (McCandless 2015)—is a hallmark of this increased availability. Bandcamp, which recently hosted a day in support of artists impacted by COVID-19, artists of color, and organizations working for racial justice (“Artists and Labels Offering Donations”), offers an example of how the shift to digital listening that Krukowski articulates can be incredibly generative and uplifting, especially for independent artists.
Moreover, Krukowski talks about how digital listening reframes the production of music, as well, giving the example of how autotune is being used in new ways in Northern Africa:
(Ways of Hearing, ep. 4, 12:10-12:50)
These positive effects of the shift to digital are just two musical examples. The shift encompasses far more than that, however—the fact that you are experiencing (or in other words, “listening” to) this multimodal essay now has everything to do with how the internet has facilitated this kind of sharing.
The examples given thus far, however, are just one side of the digital coin. Indeed, while Ways of Hearing does discuss these positive aspects of the global shift to digital, Krukowski is much more concerned with how it has affected us negatively.
These negative effects—like the positive ones—are far-reaching. In terms of music distribution, while some sites might offer better payment schemes than others, the internet at the same time can serve to obfuscate the emotional labor that goes into making music. Victoria Ruiz, frontperson of the Downtown Boys, explains that in addition to an increase in the monetary cost of living, other costs have risen too:
(Ways of Hearing, ep. 4, 15:20-15:56)
The internet, then, is not some perfect site of sharing across lived experiences, because it also involves a significant amount of depersonalization. Indeed, this separation is widespread in the digital age. In an episode about digital communications (phone calls, voice chats, etc.), Krukowski states that
(Ways of Hearing, ep. 3, 19:34-19:43)
Even when technology does not fail us (like a phone call dropping, or a poor internet connection making it difficult to understand somebody), digital listening seems to lack some fundamental aspect of interpersonal communication. Online classes, for example, as we have recently seen, have an entirely different participation dynamic than in-person. It’s much more difficult to “read the room” and decide when to speak up and participate—so many students don’t participate at all.
So where does this disconnect come from? For Krukowski, it has everything to do with the ways in which digital listening prioritizes signal over noise. In the final episode of the podcast series, Krukowski provides an excellent summary of how each episode of the podcast takes up these concepts, which I’ll provide below. The clip is a bit long at two minutes, but I highly recommend listening to it nonetheless, especially because Krukowski provides audio examples of the concepts he discusses. I’ll give a brief in-text overview of what this clip covers, however, so it is ultimately optional.
[Optional] (Ways of Hearing, ep. 6, 16:48-18:48)
In summary, signal is often conceptualized as primary content, or what we “want to hear.” A digital metronome, for example, provides us with the exact tempo we think we need. Or we might use headphones to block out unwanted sounds, like while jogging in a city. Streaming services provide the song removed from any physical context like album packaging, but also often the context of the musicians who made the song, like we saw in the case of Victoria Ruiz.
And of course, the move to digital has been co-opted by corporations, with services like Spotify or Amazon attempting to algorithmically tap into our listening, buying, browsing, and other preferences so that they might deliver content to us that we’ll pay for. As Krukowski puts it, “we’re each being transformed into signal for profitable use” (Ways of Hearing, ep. 6, 18:42-18:48)—our online presence becomes reduced down to a stream of data that can be fed into advertisement services or online shopping recommendations in order to show us exactly what we “want to hear.”
Noise, then, is the opposite of this signal. R. Murray Schafer, in his novel The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, says the following about noise:
“The most satisfactory definition of noise for general usage is still ‘unwanted sound.’ This makes noise a subjective term. One man’s music may be another man’s noise. But it holds open the possibility that in a given society there will be more agreement than disagreement as to which sounds constitute unwanted interruptions” (Schafer 273).
This novel, originally published in 1977 as The Tuning of the World, is a landmark in soundscape studies—the discipline, essentially, that examines the nexus of interaction between humans, sound, and the environment. The Ways of Hearing podcast is an excellent example of this kind of work, though the discourse around sound has developed substantially since Schafer’s novel was originally published.
I offer Schafer’s definition here because, in some respects, it marks the beginning of attending to noise (and implicitly, signal) in an ecological sense. In other words, how do signal and noise frame the interactions between humans and the environment? How about interpersonal relationships? How about how we interact with and experience music (a topic that Ways of Hearing is especially concerned with)?
Moreover, Schafer’s framing of noise also attaches a value to it. The central argument of his novel is that we might cultivate a society that focuses more on signal and less on noise—this conclusion being drawn from studying industrial noise pollution and focusing particularly on how we might recontextualize environmental noise, like birdsong, as desirable signal, and make room for these sounds within cities. Schafer’s point is indeed critical, because the acceptance of noise pollution has ecological effects such as reducing bird populations in urban environments.
However, this is but one framing of signal and noise. Ways of Hearing articulates how our modern technological society has indeed reached somewhat of a consensus of what is desirable and undesirable—but not necessarily in the constructive way envisioned by Schafer. Instead, an overemphasis on signal has blocked out the noise that, as Krukowski argues, is vitally important. Taking up the ecological example once more, our conceptions of signal and noise in the urban environment have changed entirely. Now, things like industrial sounds and birdsong become one and the same—noisy elements that are blocked out by the signal of headphones. The shape of digital society has made it far too easy to use signal in order to block out any unwanted or uncomfortable moments of noise; this extends far beyond sound, an example being the ways in which media narratives, in showing a specific signal, construct particular narratives of what is “going on” in the world. In this sense, any news that might serve to subvert the narrative of the cultural dominant is marginalized and drowned out.
In some respects, then, this radical shift from noise to signal that is articulated in Ways of Hearing is quite bleak. However, this loss of noise is by no means inalterable. Krukowski remains hopeful, remarking that
(Ways of Hearing, ep. 6, 19:44-19:56)
And indeed, this expanded listening and sharing seems especially important in our current moment. The widespread police brutality perpetrated against people of color in America, for example, is a long standing issue. However, any attempts to enact change in the system and cultivate a police force that fully and truly serves the interests of the people have been largely quashed. The Black Lives Matter movement, previously dismissed by culturally dominant media as noise, is beginning to become signal in a significant way across the world. It is my hope that this shift will be accompanied by a fundamental restructuring of society.
Learning to listen to noise, then, is crucial. However, it is also somewhat contradictory—on the one hand, we have heard through Ways of Hearing how the shift to digital listening has privileged signal over noise. At the same time, however, movements like Black Lives Matter and protests against police brutality are largely organized online. In an attempt to address this seeming contradiction, while always aiming at the fundamental hope that Krukowski articulates of embracing noise, the practice of multimodal, embodied listening can be enacted in order to reframe the ways in which we relate to the world.
Reframing the World: Embodied Listening
In her 2007 TED Talk titled “How to Truly Listen,” world-renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie describes the moment when she first began learning music (22:29-23:14):
Glennie’s initial confusion, here, is understandable—the conventional introduction to percussion takes the form of exercise books like George Lawrence Stone’s classic Stick Control for the Snare Drummer. Stone offers a rudimental, repetition-based approach: “its stick-work being entirely mechanical in scope, ‘STICK CONTROL’ does not conflict with any of the known ‘systems’ of drumming” (Stone 3). What Stick Control presumes, even within the title itself, is that a drummer will interact with their drum using sticks. Glennie’s introduction to percussion, on the contrary, explicitly went against this notion. This is not to say, of course, that Glennie’s playing somehow lacks mechanical capability—her worldwide reputation as a master percussionist is entirely deserved. What I intend to highlight, instead, is how these differing pedagogical approaches affect a percussionist’s (or musician in general) relation to their instrument.
Glennie recounts her first week with her snare drum (23:14-24:08):
Notice the thoroughly embodied ways in which Glennie interacts with the drum, hitting it with her hands in a variety of ways. Moreover, she does not limit herself to the head (top) of the drum, instead interacting as well with the sides and bottom. By eschewing the traditional pedagogical approach of workbook exercises, Glennie, from the very outset of her musical education, began relating to her instrument in a radical and generative “non-conventional” way.
I include this anecdote as an illustrative example of the central concept in this essay: multimodal, embodied listening. Multimodal listening is a framework championed by rhetorical scholar Steph Ceraso. In her 2018 book Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening, Ceraso defines multimodal embodied listening as “an ongoing, experiential, inquiry-based practice” (Ceraso 48), one that “requires listeners to attend to how sound intersects with other sensory modes to shape their embodied experiences in specific contexts” (Ceraso 29). Several salient points here are worth examining. Firstly, embodied listening, as an ongoing practice, is not an isolated event but instead a particular way of being in the world. The intersection of sound and “other sensory modes” gives embodied listening its multimodality. Evelyn Glennie provides in her TED talk an illustrative example of this multimodality (15:07-15:40):
As Ceraso explains, “when Glennie performs her sonic compositions, the visual aspects of her performance are an important part of the audience’s listening experience. The speed or slowness with which she moves her body as she plays, her facial gestures, and the way that she physically handles the instruments all contribute to how sound is being experienced by the audience” (Ceraso 34). However, sight and hearing are far from the only aspects of multimodal listening. Perhaps more important is attending to sound as “an ontology of vibrational force” (Goodman, qtd. in Comstock 168). This vibrational ontology is also discussed by Glennie in her TED talk. She gives another anecdote from her first encounter with learning music at age 12 (9:25-9:43):
This vibrational mode of encountering sound that Glennie delineates is particularly vital in multimodal listening because it brings embodiedness into the equation. “Touching sound,” observes Ceraso, “seems to be a salient part of [Glennie’s] multimodal listening practices” (Ceraso 33)—and indeed, this touch goes beyond the conventional notion of the “five senses,” instead typifying a capacious and multisensory vibrational encounter with the world. One example of this kind of encounter is music played through subwoofers in a car. If you’ve been in a car with loud bass, you’re probably familiar with the vibrations I’m talking about, here—the bass is registered in the chest more than the ears. But you can even get a sense of this when a car passes playing loud music—there’s a kind of sonic force emanating from the car.
It is important to remember that these kinds of vibrational experiences are embodied. Consider, for example, this subwoofer demo (2:37-2:48):
The bass, here, is experienced in a much shallower way than being in (or beside) an actual car playing music through subwoofers—this video, because we are not fully embodied while encountering it, does not send vibrations resounding throughout our chest. It does, however, showcase the multimodality of embodied listening in a different way. Below, I’ve provided the same audio from the clip you just watched:
Subwoofer Demo Audio
Did the experience feel different? For me, at least, removing the audio from its visual context further distances it from its real-life vibrational origin. In the video, we can see the sound coming through the speakers in the form of vibrations—much like, for example, Evelyn Glennie’s technique discussed above of playing sounds without actually striking the instrument. In this respect, we can see that there are different levels of embodiment, each engaging another aspect of our sensory experience.
Now that we’ve more or less developed an idea of what multimodal embodied listening entails, we now can turn to its significance. Ceraso explains that practicing this kind of listening can “help listeners develop a heightened awareness of sound as an ecological event in which they are participating” (Ceraso 35). This ecological turn towards sound echoes the concern with signal and noise that both Schafer and Krukowski talk about in The Tuning of the World and Ways of Hearing, respectively. In this respect, multimodal, embodied listening can serve as a starting point for addressing the recent turn towards digital listening that has privileged signal over noise.
However, addressing signal and noise, here, is less about reaching a societal consensus on what sounds are “unwanted noise” as Schafer imagines it, and instead emphasizes difference. Ceraso writes that “multimodal listening pedagogy offers flexible listening strategies that account for diverse bodies instead of proposing that all listeners should (or can) listen in the same way” (Ceraso 35). Ceraso, here, provides the example of Evelyn Glennie herself. Glennie, who is profoundly deaf, expresses frustration at the fact that her “hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers me” (Glennie, “Hearing Essay”). That is, reporters are often far more interested in Glennie’s deafness than her musicianship itself. This kind of fixation constitutes a failure to account for the “diverse bodies” that Ceraso describes, instead construing Glennie’s musicianship as an anomaly or as in spite of her deafness. On the contrary, multimodal listening recognizes that no two listening experiences are the same, because embodied experiences are unique to each individual as well. Glennie explains this in terms of the relationship between performer and listener (25:53-26:21):
And of course, the same holds true for differences in experiences between performers (if several are on-stage), between individual audience members, etc. In this respect, multimodal embodied listening is so profound because it accounts for and celebrates these differences in experience, in a way that can begin to reorient our understanding of signal and noise by allowing our bodies to become, as Glennie puts it, “resonating chambers” that listen across difference.
Embodied Difference: Analyzing Three Pieces for Solo Snare Drum
In order to examine how these differences in embodied listening manifest, and also how we might use them in reframing the dichotomy between signal and noise, we will examine Evelyn Glennie’s anecdote about her introduction to percussion, which provides an excellent framework. Recall that her first experience with the snare drum was without sticks—she instead had to explore the constituent parts of the drum and how it interacted with her body (and vice versa). This kind of experimental/experiential playing with percussion has also been expressed, recently, through various pieces for solo snare, which interrogate previously unexplored ways of relating to the instrument. This relationality between instrument and performer, I argue, can be understood as an example of embodied listening. First, we’ll examine three pieces of solo snare work, examining how each interrogates the drum in a particular way. Then, we’ll connect the reframing that these pieces do to the work of embodied listening.
Tonia Ko’s “Negative Magic,” Nina C. Young’s piece under the working title of “UnSnared Drum (excerpt),” and Gene Koshinski’s “SyNc” examine the ways in which performers can interact with the snare drum in the same experimental/experiential way as Glennie did when she was 12. Ko’s and Young’s pieces are both part of Unsnared Drum, an ongoing project commissioned by Michael Compitello that is interested in exploring exactly this kind of non-conventional solo snare work. The Unsnared Drum project, then, will be useful in developing an analytical framework to examine all three of these pieces.
Unsnared Drum revolves around a few key concepts. Firstly is to create a body of solo snare work that doesn’t align with mainstream ways of understanding the instrument: “many of the extant solo pieces [for snare],” writes Compitello, “are military test pieces or pedagogical works designed to prepare percussionists for orchestral repertoire” (Compitello). These pieces, planted firmly within the dominant cultural contexts of military and canonical orchestral repertoire, seldom explore novel avenues of interfacing with the snare. Unsnared Drum, then, aims to depart from these conventional pieces, incorporating an additional critical element: Compitello writes that “the centerpiece of Unsnared Drum is our collaborative work during the compositional process” (Compitello).
Both the willingness to explore variegated kinds of lived experiences (represented here as pieces being performed) as well as the sharing of these experiences by communal composition are strongly reminiscent of multimodal, embodied listening. In analyzing two pieces from Unsnared Drum, as well as Koshinski’s “SyNc,” then, we can bring into salience various aspects of multimodality and embodiedness and explore how they resonate beyond the performer-instrument relationship.
One piece written for Unsnared Drum is Tonia Ko’s “Negative Magic.” Ko explains a revelation she had during the writing process: “I was not to compose ‘just’ for snare drum, but was curating a combined state of all the separate parts: the drum head, rim, and snares” (Ko [A]). Immediately, we can see how this holistic understanding of the instrument echoes Evelyn Glennie’s initial encounter with her own drum. In terms of multimodal listening, this willingness to reorient our understanding of our surroundings—the object(s) which we are interacting/performing/listening with—helps in understanding sound, as Ceraso emphasizes, as an ecological event. This ecology (of the event, of the snare drum), thus understood, holds an incredible vibrational capaciousness.
For example, here’s an excerpt from the score of “Negative Magic” (Ko [B]):
And below is the audio version of the performance. I’ve linked it in its entirety because it’s well worth listening to, but the moment notated on the score begins at 1:27 (opens in separate window):
Examining the score, the drumhead, which is conventionally the site of interaction with the snare, is momentarily muted entirely. In its stead, the focus shifts to the second staff—its lines representing the rim, lug casing, and shell of the drum. In directing the performer to play on these traditionally-overlooked sites of the drum, Ko creates new sonic potentialities. Moreover, because specific locations on the drum are left unspecified (a performer might, for example, play on the part of the shell facing them at one point and then on the opposite side at the next), the full experimental capacity of the drum-as-ecology is harnessed: no two performances will be quite the same.
This variegation is further emphasized by additional directions from Ko. She writes that her “piece maximizes the resonance and beating of the drum by tuning it irregularly: both the drumhead and snares are almost completely loosened. As snare drums are wonderfully diverse, this set-up creates a sound world unique to every instrument” (Ko [A]). Indeed, as every snare sounds slightly different, the performative variations are infinite. Of course, no performance of music is exactly the same, but by emphasizing difference in the ecological site of vibration (the snare itself) in addition to variations between performers (who are also acting as listeners), “Negative Magic” exemplifies the spectrum of possible embodied listening experiences.
If Ko is interested in the snare as an ecological site/event, Nina C. Young explores the potentiality surrounding this ecology (which in itself can be said to be another ecology). In her piece under the working title “UnSnared Drum (excerpt),” Young presents a multimodal mixture of electronics, drum, and visuals. Young’s bio says that “her experience in the electronic music studio informs her acoustic work, which takes as its given not melody and harmony, but sound itself, continuously metamorphosing from one state to another” (Young [B]). This “sound itself,” as we can see in the performance below (Young [A]), again linked in full, is more than the audible noises of the drum (the section I’ll be discussing begins at 4:47):
WARNING: the video below contains flickering lights which may cause issues for those with photosensitive epilepsy.
Indeed, the idea of the “sound itself” permeates this piece. Much like a car’s subwoofer emanates sound in a vibrational, touch-oriented form, “UnSnared Drum (excerpt)” presents sound in a similarly-multimodal fashion. Visually, this takes shape in the form of the two “halves” of the performance video: the nine panels on the left, saturated in flickering lights and desynced from the performance on the right (with variations flashing between each individual panel, as well), problematizes the relationship between sight and sound, much like Evelyn Glennie does when playing an instrument while not actually striking it at all. Young, however, emphasizes this disconnect even more by incorporating electronics. The snare drum from 4:50-5:00, enhanced by electronics, seems to emanate sound of its own accord, which constitutes a radical reframing of the relationship between sound and percussion. For a moment, the performer, though they may be manipulating the electronics, is nonetheless taken out of the picture entirely in terms of the snare. The performance’s almost ghostly visual elements, with the desynchronized panels on the left, reinforces this notion.
However, from 5:01-5:09, the performer is brought back into the picture, playing the snare with sticks. Young’s notion of the “sound itself,” here, is further complicated: we cannot say that any of the discrete elements of the performance (the visuals, the electronics, the lights, the sticks on the snare) make up the sound in its entirety; the snare roll is not just a snare roll. Instead, each element contributes to the ecological event of the performance, and their juxtaposition provides a unique opportunity to explore sound. The performance would be much different, for example, if only the right side of the video was present, or if the electronic elements were removed. That it would differ might seem to go without saying, but it nonetheless represents a crucial part of how multimodality and embodiment function vis-à-vis sound.
Although Gene Koshinki’s “SyNc” is not a part of the Unsnared Drum project, it functions along similar lines of communal experimentation. Koshinki explains that the piece “was commissioned by 42 percussionists, led by Tracy Wiggins” (Koshinki [B]), so if the compositional process was not explicitly collaborative, it nonetheless represents a joining of several percussionists aiming at a unified production. Koshinski, in remarking that “this piece ‘syncs’ the wonderful timbral possibilities of the snare drum with sounds that come to life when interacting with it. (Koshinki [B]), not only echoes the valences of the drum explored by Ko and Young but also foregrounds these aspects in terms of interaction. This interaction, in the embodied listening sense, is rooted in a problematization of the “conventional” ways of interfacing with a drum. Koshinki writes that “the significance of ‘five’ permeates the piece as nearly all of the musical ideas found in ‘SyNc’ are rooted in this number” (Koshinki [B]). On the one hand, this seems like an entirely “conventional” impetus behind the piece—to showcase a particular proficiency in performing musical groups of five. Koshinki, however, extends the significance of five far beyond this strictly divisional sense—an illustrative example can be found from 0:02 to 0:25 in the video linked (again, in full) below (Koshinski [A]):
Koshinski, sending a ball around the edge of the drum, allows it to complete five full rotations around the drum after the initial throw before picking it up. Afterwards, he begins playing—with his hands, much like one might play a bongo or djembe. Immediately, then, Koshinski establishes a performative relationality with the drum that transcends the conventional framework of arm -> drumstick -> snare. Later in the piece (see 1:56-2:11), Koshinski incorporates various “mediating” elements, such as a kalimba and a brush. These elements further transform the relationship between performer and instrument. The kalimba, for instance, recontextualizes snare buzz into an almost distortion-like effect; the brush, too, participates in this reframed soundscape of the snare-as-distorted. Koshinksi’s “SyNc,” then, explores how performers might reexamine the tools they use to relate to the drum, both in the sense of the physical (drumstick vs. ball vs. kalimba, etc.) and theoretical (the myriad ways in which one might address writing a piece based around the number “5”).
Ko, Young, and Koshinski’s snare pieces, then, each explore a new means of relating to their instrument. Ko, by emphasizing chance and variation (between performers, their instruments, and each individual performance), as well as reframing which parts of the snare drum performers can/should interact with, draws attention to the vast possibilities for listening to, being within, and producing sound. That is, sound becomes an ecological-vibrational site with innumerable factors each intersecting, influencing, and interacting with each other. Young’s piece similarly draws attention to sound-as-ecology, though her piece specifically incorporates multimodal elements of sight and electronic manipulation, foregrounding the possibility of new ways of relating to sound that go beyond ear-ing. Koshinski’s piece, too, highlights this new relationality, showing how hands-on physical interaction with sound might differ from interacting through various mediums (a kalimba, a drumstick, a plastic ball). Each of these pieces, then, offer a profoundly transformative sense of what solo snare repertoire can encompass.
Conclusion: Signal, Noise, and Embodied Listening
The three snare pieces analyzed above, I argue, can be understood in the context of how we might incorporate embodied listening into our lives to confront the shift from noise to signal that Krukowski addresses in Ways of Hearing. Signal, especially in the digital age, has been co-opted by the cultural dominant in an attempt to oversimplify and subsequently classify lived experience. Simplicity, here, is efficiency. Targeted advertisements can deliver a signal that tells you exactly what you want to buy, perhaps before you know it. Digital music recording allows for mistakes to be removed after recording, reducing the amount of time that needs to be spent in the studio. Political narratives are carefully crafted, manipulated, and broadcasted to work towards a singular image or idea of current events.
Of course, some of this shift to signal is a good thing—targeted music recommendations save a vast amount of time in searching for new things to listen to; the streamlined process of producing art can lower financial and temporal barriers to allow a wider variety of artists to make a living off their craft. Signal itself, in other words, is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the shift from noise to signal that Krukowski articulates involves, to a significant extent, the erasure of noise, which serves to deny the messy, complex relationalities that constitute our day-to-day lives.
The consequences of this are immense. Complicated realities ranging from systemic racism to the vast spectrum of gender identities are often subjugated beneath a narrative signal that aims to erase their existence: racism is gone in the United States because of voting rights; gender is binary and tied to sex. Such statements are blatantly incorrect as well as immensely problematic, and serve to directly not only erase the issue but also the identities of those affected by it. However, because they are so simplified, far too many folks accept them at face value. This project is not aimed at dismantling these misconceptions, or indeed to refute any oversimplified signal that is pushed by the cultural dominant—instead, I hope that it might offer an alternative way of encountering and being within the world, informed by embodied listening.
To this end, the conclusions drawn in analyzing the three solo snare drum pieces provide useful analogies to explain how embodied listening can be enacted in our daily lives. Each piece foregrounds, specifically, the ecological-relational aspect of performance and listening. In other words, where a “conventional” solo snare piece might highlight the skill of the performer or the rhythm of the music itself, Ko, Young, and Koshinski’s pieces instead draw attention to other aspects of the sound experience. The constituent parts of the snare beyond the head (the conventional site of instrument-performer relationality) are brought to the forefront, and various non-stick elements from hands to kalimbas to electronics are also incorporated. In terms of embodied listening, this is a fundamental first step: to understand the sound event as not just a sonic signal to be taken in by our ears, but instead as an ongoing ecological process that is contingent on every discrete element. As performance pieces, moreover, these works draw attention to embodiment within this ecology—that is, a listener is also intimately involved in producing the sound that they hear. A performer is the most obvious example of this, but even an audience member’s breath, heartbeat, applause, and presence as a body for sound waves to encounter and bounce off of contribute to the sonic ecology of the performance.
Moreover, these pieces are multimodal—the striking visual of the ball traveling around the snare in Koshinski’s piece, or Young’s incorporation of ethereal afterimages in her piece, contribute a critical element to the performances. And although Ko’s piece does not have a visual element, the image of a performer striking various parts of the drum at random is nonetheless striking. This visuality is joined, of course, by the various other elements at play—touch, specifically, is highlighted when Koshinski plays with his hands directly on the snare or Young’s electronics send vibrations through the listener’s chest.
As collaborative pieces, moreover (whether by involvement in “Unsnared Drum” or, like Koshinski’s piece, commissioned by a group), these pieces make explicit the implicit nature of sonic ecologies—no sound occurs in a vacuum. There is always—always—an intersection of vast and diverse bodies that are brought to bear on the listening experience. Even in the classic adage of a tree falling in the woods with nobody around, the vegetation itself, the earth which the tree lands in, and any animals are participants in the soundscape. In this respect, then, we can see too how multimodal, embodied listening moves beyond the tendency to privilege humans (and specifically human ear-ing) as the primary element of a listening experience.
These pieces, then, showcase the rich capaciousness of possibility that multimodal, embodied listening entails. Recognizing this potentiality, I believe, is critical in moving away from strict signal and embracing noise. To frame it as an analogy, moving away from traditional snare repertoire and into the realm of the pieces analyzed above is an enactment of embracing noise. Of course, however, it isn’t that simple—infinite contingencies and complications color every sonic ecology, and a recognition and embrace of these uncertainties can be difficult or frightening. Ultimately, however, in embracing noise, one does not need to account for or understand all these variegations. Instead, we might begin by understanding our role in the sonic ecology not as a listener but as, as Evelyn Glennie puts it, a resonating chamber—allowing all of the elements of the ecology to reverberate within and without the body. This constitutes an ongoing process as well as a way of understanding and being within the world. Ultimately, this process of multimodal, embodied listening, I believe, is fundamental in accepting noise into our lives, recognizing that each individual element of an ecology (sonic or otherwise) is crucial.